‘Murder, Inc.’ questions JFK assassination

Many books on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy have an agenda, jumping through a series of conspiratorial hoops to bolster a conclusion already arrived at. James Johnston’s “Murder, Inc.,” is different: He dispassionately sifts through the evidence regarding the CIA’s activities during the Kennedy administration and the president’s keen interest in overthrowing Fidel Castro, and comes up not so much with answers as with some very intriguing questions.

Did Castro warn JFK of possible retaliation for the CIA’s many (and inept)

BOOK REVIEW

‘MURDER INC.: THE CIA UNDER JOHN F. KENNEDY’

Grade: A attempts to kill the Cuban dictator? Was the CIA campaign to kill Castro the reason it withheld information from the federal investigations into Kennedy’s assassination?

Johnston, a Washington, D.C., attorney who served as lawyer for the 1970s Senate investigations into CIA assassination plots, here puts that knowledge to good use. He wrote much of the book with the aid of recently declassified “secret” government files on the JFK assassination.

Castro later denied any role in Kennedy’s death. But the administration’s tireless efforts to remove him from power later led President Lyndon Johnson to believe his predecessor had been killed in retaliation. We likely will never know for sure exactly what happened, but Johnston has built a firm foundation to argue that the U.S. government’s own efforts to kill Castro may have backfired in the most tragic way imaginable.